the ward bond film festival continues

the Long Voyage Home: (1940. dir: John Ford) My God, what Gregg Toland and John Ford can do together. The space that Ford gives his actors to move around in, he gives that to Toland as well; he doesn't clutter the images up with words without a decent reason. Let's be clear: this is a b&w seagoing adventure pulled together from several short plays by Eugene O'Neill, and I have a short temper where O'Neill is concerned. I like him, and I'd watch all six hours of Mourning Becomes Electra if given the chance (and it looks like I never will be), but I have no patience for any of his myriad plays about people whose only joys come in drunkenness and their only problems from an inability to walk out of a bar. It's probably one of those things like the Grateful Dead or smoking cigarettes: either you get it or you don't. Personally, I never got the Grateful Dead, and listening to O'Neill's characters mewl and puke about how they've had to give up everything for the bottle makes me drum my fingers and yawn and look at my watch.

Luckily, O'Neill is not why you watch this. Officially, it's a John Wayne film, the Ford/Wayne follow-up to Stagecoach, but really it's an ensemble piece spearheaded by Thomas Mitchell's customary cute-but-clever Drunken Irishman. Wayne has never been more gorgeous or more sensuously photographed, but it's a pretty-boy role, it's got no heft to it, and he's hobbled by a fairly awful Swedish accent. But none of that is why you watch it, either.

The movie starts with a ship in harbor. Everything is still, stagnant, except on the island shore, where native women writhe in heat while their mysterious native drums beat. There's a beautiful shot of a sailor silhouetted atop the massive dark hulk of ship lighting a cigarette, then we go in close to see it's Ward Bond, blowing smoke rings and gazing to shore. Duke joins him for a moment, then stretches in good-humored frustration and goes away to lie across a bulkhead and look at the stars. It's a beautiful, strange opening, setting up shipboard existence as a sort of anti-life, a suspended animation into which these sailors keep placing themselves because they haven't got the stones to rejoin the world, spoken of warily as "the Land". When on The Land, although they talk wildly of escaping the harsh and fruitless imprisonment at sea, they go immediately into a bar until they've drunk up their money, then use that as an excuse to escape back to sea.

But you don't watch this movie for O'Neill's insights into life or suffering or even drunkenness. You watch it for the artistry of its making. Look at that gorgeous framing, shot by shot. Fan as I am of a strong narrative flow, I have to admire that Ford seems to make his pictures first and foremost to give us a taste of living Someplace Other: in a Northeastern farming community during the Revolution in Drums Along the Mohawk, or in the heat and dirt of the Depression in Grapes of Wrath, or, in this, on a dark fortress of a steamer caught all around by ocean. Even in those films of his which employ the strongest narrative line, it's never the greatest thing. The greatest thing is his love of these worlds of his own creation, and his patience in showing us their beauties and darknesses.



On Dangerous Ground: (1952. dir: Nicholas Ray) I'm gazing across the shifting ground of time to another era entirely, which tends to obscure one's clarity of vision, but it seems to me this must have felt truly edgy and dangerous when it came out. Like most Ray movies, it's got a cheese factor, and hip teen patois rarely ages well, but it's half in love with its own darkness, and by the standards of its day it may have been the fastest paced noir yet.

The first half follows three cops on their beat around one of the ugliest noir-cities you've ever seen, and Robert Ryan, with moments of true Lawrence-Tierney kind of bad-assed mofo, is so attracted and repulsed by the streets he walks that he's going over to the dark side, slowly petrifying into a being other than human, something made out of rock or maybe cruelty. About halfway through he gets sent north into a rural area to help solve the murder of a young girl, and ends up accompanying the shotgun-wielding, vengeance-fixated father (played by Bond) on a search for the killer. Ida Lupino is the killer's blind sister who winds up melting the ice that's been mucking up the workings of Ryan's heart, but the two of them play hard enough against mawkishness that even I was not opposed to the sentiment of it. I think it's the best performance I've seen from Ryan.



Canyon Passage: (1946. dir: Jacques Tourneur) My love for this movie is inordinate; it licks right up over the edges of reason. First off, it gets some billing as a musical, which I hasten to assure you it is not. Hoagy Carmichael sings three songs is all, and it's got none of that Bustin'-into-Song-as-Soliloquy nonsense; he's just a strange character who walks around town with a mandolin and likes to sing, and folks put up with him. Possibly I love it in part because it was set and filmed in my neck of the woods (Jacksonville, officially, and you can see weird old Mt Thielsen crooked in the background of the cabin-raising scene, and when the Indians are on the war-path, the war-path goes right along the rim of Crater Lake). It opens in Portland, back when it was a dirt-laned port-town. "1000 people and raining," the Dana Andrews character describes it. If you step off the ramp in the street, you fall waist-high into mud.

Mostly, though, my love is roused by Jacques Tourneur. My God, the colors in this thing! Being Tourneur, he uses shadows like a master of the art, but I never knew he was a master of technicolor as well. (It reminds me some of that other masterpiece of colour, Drums Along the Mohawk, in which Ford takes the breath clean out of your lungs with the boldness of his palette. His indoor nocturnal scenes are done up in what I can only describe as Dario Argento reds and blues, emphasized by deep pockets of shadow.) The world he creates is fascinating down to smallest details.

The story is compelling without being extraordinary, but the dialogue stands a rung or two above your average oater, with some psychological depth. It's got the parallel extremes of sweetness and darkness, that crucial factor which separates the stallions from the eunuchs in the Western genre; it's got a solid cast, with Ward Bond giving a note-perfect performance as the town bully, haplessly named Honey Bragg. There's a fight scene in the middle, when Bragg calls Dana Andrews' Logan Stuart out, that is one of the best filmed I've ever seen. Bragg is already waiting at the high-ceilinged bar when the whole town converges, bringing Stuart like a lamb to slaughter ("He had an arm like a chunk of oak," he'd said earlier of Bragg), and you see shadows of their heads fall against the far wall until all the sunlight is blocked out. Once the fighting starts, it's Bond's Bragg who is the focus of both lighting and camera. Lit and shot at extreme close range to emphasize the blood and sweat, his fall is like that of a bull in the ring. It's a vicious fight, relentless, nothing pretty about it. "Yellow dogs," he barks at the cheering townsfolk as he stumbles away, beaten and humiliated, brought to the nadir from which he will single-handedly incite the local Indians to destroy the bulk of the white populace.

There is darkness shot all through this bright, sweet film, like poisoned veins: murders and nihilism and Mammon-worship. Reminiscent of Tourneur's films with Val Lewton, there's a beautiful raven-haired proto-Goth woman. The Brian Donlevy character, a compulsive gambler, is obsessed with her, and she is married to a man in black who owns an ongoing card game and a bad cough and who says he calls friend "...any man who believes like I do that the human race is a horrible mistake." Whenever someone is about to commit a murder, Tourneur shows us their eyes as they decide to do it, then fades out on their mid-sections as they walk toward the camera to commit the act, a remarkably effective technique. Horses get shot down in cold blood, folks get scalped; miners are constantly being reported murdered throughout, we assume for their gold, as is the one we see killed, although it's always the Indians who garner the blame; an Indian girl gets raped (we assume, from the look in Bragg's eye) then murdered. And throughout, there's the nagging sense that just behind the happy community feeling (one new bride gushes at her cabin-raising about how lovely it is that all these people came out to help, and people set her straight: they're doing it because they want new neighbors, and more potential guns against the Indians) there's a rabid crowd ready to turn and string you up, as evidenced by the ongoing incitements from the townsfolk for bloody fights on which they can lay wagers, and on their quickness to jail and plan a lynching for the banker who is accused of killing a miner.

Still, in the end, with the town lying in ashes, farms burned and people slain, there's still a feeling of regeneration in the air. It's the culmination of a cycle, not of the world. Tourneur has balanced the darkness and the light with his usual ease, and somehow pulls off an entirely believable redemptive ending.